Championship Foosball – It’s a Thing

The sounds of a foosball game are specific and unforgettable: The rattling roll of the ball on the table surface, the hollow thump of the metal rod being spun, the sudden plastic thwack of a “player” making contact with the ball, the satisfying metallic ring when it rockets into a goal.

These familiar sounds were the soundtrack to the recent London Masters tournament — held in May at a former parking garage-turned-community space in Peckham, South London, and hosted by the British Foosball Association — albeit at several times the usual speed.

This is competition foosball, a fast-paced, physically demanding, and very strategic game that’s what more or less would happen if championship chess and Olympic table tennis had a baby in a bar. Here, 85 world-class table soccer athletes battled it out through 678 matches for a little more than £2,000 (around $2,500) in prize money across the categories. The purse wouldn’t have been enough to cover travel expenses for some of the players — at this level, competitors came from Canada, Austria, France, Switzerland, even as far away as Malaysia and Nepal — but the money wasn’t really the point. They play for the love of foos.

Like a lot of players, Will Hawkes first started playing foosball when he was at university, hanging out at the student union with friends. “I was no good at darts and I was no good at pool, billiards. But some people were playing the foosball table. I just started playing with it and … I was completely hooked,” he says. “And that was all I ever wanted to do.”

That was more than 30 years ago, and though Hawkes is not a full-time professional table soccer player — he teaches math at a secondary school — he is internationally ranked, is president of the British Foosball Association and secretary of the International Table Soccer Federation, the sport’s governing body, and has played foosball in more than 30 countries. Hawkes was both a competitor and an organizer at the London Masters. “It’s like a family,” Hawkes says of the community, pointing out that in some cases, this was literal — several competitors share last names.

Dave Ziemann, one of Britain’s top veteran players, agrees: “Everyone knows everyone.”

There was a time, however, when everyone didn’t know everyone — back when table soccer was poised to become the next big thing.

The origins of table soccer are a bit of a mystery. According to some reports, similar style games emerged around Europe in the 1890s and early 1900s, just as real soccer was becoming formalized into clubs and leagues. Whether that was actually the case, the first-ever patent for an “apparatus for playing a game of table football” was granted to a British soccer fan called Harold Searles Thornton in 1923. Thornton’s model looked more or less like table soccer today, featuring eight rotating rods bearing fixed “players,” a ball, and a goal at either end.

But despite how much fun the game was, Thornton didn’t exactly hit it big with table soccer. Neither did his American uncle, Louis P. Thornton of Portland, Oregon, who patented a version of the game in the U.S. after playing it in England. Uncle Thornton’s “indoor football game” never found a market, and the patent was left to expire.

But table soccer did find a niche in Britain, while innovative people in other European countries were doing similar things. “It was being kind of invented independently,” explains Hawkes. “The Germans did something, the French did something, the British did something, the Spanish did something. People were experimenting.” During World War II, these experiments became popular in pubs, cafés, and bars in Europe, emerging after the war as a kind of social, easy-to-play-while-drinking game similar to darts or boules. By the 1950s, the first table soccer leagues were appearing in Belgium.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that an American tried again with table soccer. Serviceman Lawrence Patterson, the son of a car salesman from Cincinnati, Ohio, was stationed in West Germany; there, he saw just how popular the game was with German youth and American soldiers alike. When he returned home in 1962, he brought the game with him, in a table designed to his specifications. Patterson’s timing was perfect: He sold his version of the game, calling it foosball, as a coin-operated entertainment at a time when pinball machines and similar games were doing big business in arcades, bars, bus stations — anywhere people had time to kill. By 1968, sales of the table had reached $2 million.

From there, tournament foosball was a natural evolution. Early in the 1970s, venues began organizing competitions, sometimes offering deluxe foosball tables as the ultimate prize. In 1972, a billiards hall owner in Missoula, Montana, organized what would become the first of the branded Tournament Soccer competitions, offering a $1,500 prize for the quickest pull shots in the game; by the next year, the purse had swelled to $5,000 across four categories, men’s and women’s singles and doubles. Lee Peppard soon sold his billiards hall to invest in foosball competitions and table sales full time, basing his business out of Seattle. In May 1974, the $50,000 pot attracted hundreds of foosballers from across the country and the world to play on specially crafted Tournament Soccer tables.

Teenagers who had started playing foosball at skating rinks and arcades or, if they were lucky, in friends’ basements, suddenly found themselves winning Porsches and thousands of dollars; dedicated foosball players figured out that they could earn a living driving around the country and playing the competition circuit. The prizes got bigger and bigger — $250,000, then $500,000, then $1,000,000 — and, according to some sources, foosball was the eighth most popular sport in America for a time. Foosball had an official magazine, a sponsor in Schlitz Beer, a growing roster of heroes, and a legion of fans.

In 1980, Tournament Soccer’s Million Dollar Game tour played hotel ballrooms up and down the east and west coasts of America, drawing thousands of players and spectators. But just one year later, the whole glamorous spectacle came to a grinding halt: Tournament Soccer declared bankruptcy.

So what happened? Video games. While foosball and other mechanical coin-operated games were noisily dominating the entertainment space, digital arcade games like Space Invaders and Death Race were gaining ground, infiltrating arcades and market share. In 1980, Namco released Pac-Man — and just as he ate up the little white dots in the game, he whomp-whomp-whomped the coin-operated competition. A foosball table might bring in $120 a week, but suddenly, arcade games were pulling in $600. It was simple math; sales of foosball tables tanked, dropping from 5,000 tables a month to barely 100. By the time the first and likely only film to capture the game’s heyday was in theatres, 1981’s Longshot starring Leif Garrett, foosball was already over.

Or was it?

The bubble had popped, but foos still had fans. Tables could be found in game rooms, youth clubs, bars, and basements. Foosball also remained popular in Europe; players there had never expected to make a living off foosball, so instead played on in clubs and leagues. Through the 1980s and into the ’90s, most American players held down paying jobs while competing on the weekends, often driving for hours to play for hours at state and national championships. In the mid-1990s, foosball again attracted attention from people outside the community — in 1994, the Tornado World Championships in Dallas even scored a segment on ESPN.

It was enough that a few players hoped they could become full-time foosers. But once again it didn’t last, and, once again, competition foosball quietly carried on. In 2002, the International Table Soccer Federation formed to formalize the clubs and leagues of largely European players and to run the World Championships and World Cup. At the same time, the internet was bringing people together in ways that were never possible before; table soccer found a lifeline in the new ways the next generation of serious players was finding to connect.

Since those first golden days in the 1970s ended, competition foosball has more or less stayed a niche and tight-knit community of players and semi-pros, people with regular jobs and an astounding skill at rocketing a small ball into a goal, using only a plastic player on a rod to do so.

“Once you’re in, you’re in: A whole world of people who, all we do and we think about is table football,” says Hawkes. And back at the London Masters, that was clear: While players waited for their matches, they talked strategy, murmured comments about play, and assessed their upcoming opponents’ weaknesses, or else watched YouTube videos of plays.

These players don’t necessarily want to see foosball in the Olympics, although they get asked that question a lot. But getting table soccer more widely recognized as a sport by authorities would mean more funding, a higher profile, and more teams. At the moment, only a handful of countries — China and Luxembourg among them — have done so, allowing the sport to grow beyond the few hundred top players. It would also mean more people enjoying a sport that Hawkes and the other players at the London Masters love dearly.

“What is a sport? What’s the purpose of sport?” Hawkes asks. “In the end, it’s about participation. It’s about activity.” Recently, he managed to get four soccer tables installed at the secondary school where he teaches. “They’re really popular. But do I do coaching? Do I do school tournaments? I don’t need to — because the kids are just having lots of fun with it. And that’s kind of the whole thing: Are we creating fun?”

 

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie’s work has appeared in The Guardian, The Boston Globe, and others. She is the author of Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories from History Without the Fairy-Tale Endings. For more, visit lindarodriguezmcrobbie.com.

This article is featured in the September/October 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.